Guidlines to start C#: Copy and Paste not make you programmer

Taken from here http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/topic/234278-how-to-send-email-on-c%23/#/

 Copy/paste plagiarizing of other people's code you find on the internet does not make you a programmer, coder, software engineer. Let's be clear about that.

Some day when you respect yourself, and show respect to other people's intellectual work you should work on learning to UNDERSTAND how to write your own code from scratch.

I hate to sound disheartening, but if you are this new to C# I think it would be in your interest to work through a book, lessons, tutorials etc. before trying to rush out and build a program from scratch with no experience.

A person does not say "I've never played an instrument nor can I read sheet music: I think I'll go write an opera as a self-teaching experience."

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Standard resources, references and suggestions for new programmers.

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I would recommend you start with "Hello World" just like the other million+ coders out there. Then work your way up to the more advanced tasks like this.

The problem with taking on large, complex tasks like this when you are new to coding is that

• it will frustrate you to the point of quitting,
• you don't know enough about coding to know where to start or in what direction to design your program
• You risk learning via the 'Swiss cheese' method where you only learn certain bits and pieces for the one project but have huge holes in your education.

I am going to guess that you are trying to teach yourself C# without much guidance, a decent book or without knowing where to look. Sometimes just knowing where to look can make all the difference. Google is your friend.
Search with either "C#" or "MSDN" as the first word: "MSDN Picturebox", "C# Custom Events", "MSDN timer" etc.

But honestly, just typing away and seeing what pops up in Intellisense is going to make your self-education take 20 years. You can learn by trying to reverse engineer the language through banging on the keyboard experimentation - or you can learn by doing the tutorials and following a good "How to learn C#" book.

Free editions of Visual Studio 2010

May I suggest picking up a basic C# introductory book? There are so many great "How do I build my first application" tutorials on the web... There are dozens of "Learn C# in 21 days", "My first C# program" type books at your local book seller or even public library.

D.I.C. C# Resource page Start here
Intro to C# online tutorial then here...
C# control structures then here.
MSDN Beginner Developer video series
MSDN video on OOP principals, making classes, constructors, accessors and method overloading
MSDN Top guideline violations, know what to avoid before you do it.
Design patterns as diagrams

The tutorials below walk through making an application including inheritance, custom events and custom controls.
Bulding an application - Part 1
Building an application - Part 2
Quick and easy custom events
Passing values between forms/classes

Working with environmental variables
'Why do we use delegates?' thread

Debugging tutorial
Debugging tips
Great debugging tips
It still doesn't work, article

Build a Program Now! in Visual C# by Microsoft Press, ISBN 0-7356-2542-5
is a terrific book that has you build a Windows Forms application, a WPF app, a database application, your own web browser.

C# Cookbooks
Are a great place to get good code, broken down by need, written by coding professionals. You can use the code as-is, but take the time to actually study it. These professionals write in a certain style for a reason developed by years of experience and heartache.

Microsoft Visual Studio Tips, 251 ways to improve your productivity, Microsoft press, ISBN 0-7356-2640-5
Has many, many great, real-world tips that I use all the time.

Writing a text file is always one of the first things people want to do, in order to store data like high-scores, preferences and so on
Writing a text file tutorial.
Reading a text file tutorial.

And everyone always wants to connect to a database, right out of the gate so
Database tutorials right here on DIC

These are just good every-day references to put in your bookmarks.
MSDN C# Developers Center with tutorials
Welcome to Visual Studio

Have you seen the 500+ MSDN Code Samples? They spent a lot of time creating samples and demos. It seems a shame to not use them.

Let me also throw in a couple tips:

• You have to program as if everything breaks, nothing works, the cyberworld is not perfect, the attached hardware is flakey, the network is slow and unreliable, the harddrive is about to fail, every method will return an error and every user will do their best to break your software. Confirm everything. Range check every value. Make no assumptions or presumptions.
• Take the extra 3 seconds to rename your controls each time you drag them onto a form. The default names of button1, button2... button54 aren't very helpful. If you rename them right away to something like btnOk, btnCancel, btnSend etc. it helps tremendously when you make the methods for them because they are named after the button by the designer.
  btnSend_Click(object sender, eventargs e) is a lot easier to maintain than button1_click(object sender, eventargs e)
• You aren't paying for variable names by the byte. So instead of variables names of a, b, c go ahead and use meaningful names like Index, TimeOut, Row, Column and so on. You should avoid 'T' for the timer. Amongst other things 'T' is commonly used throughout C# for Type and this will lead to problems. There are naming guidelines you should follow so your code confirms to industry standards. It makes life much easier on everyone around you, including those of us here to help. If you start using the standards from the beginning you don't have to retrain yourself later.
• Try to avoid having work actually take place in GUI control event handlers. It is usually better to have the GUI handler call other methods so those methods can be reused and make the code more readible.
  

  01	btnSave(object sender, eventargs e)

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  {

  03	SavePreferences();

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  }

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  06	SaveMenuItem(object sender, eventargs e)

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  {

  08	SavePreferences();

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  }

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  11	SaveContextMenu(object sender, eventargs e)

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  {

  13	SavePreferences();

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  }

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  16	Form1_Closing(object sender, eventargs e)

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  {

  18	if (IsDirty) SavePreferences();

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  }